Pakistan is moving beyond cautious interest in Bitcoin — it is preparing to hold it as a state asset.

Bilal Bin Saqib, chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), has been presenting the idea at global crypto conferences: Pakistan should hold Bitcoin as a strategic national asset. Not for trading, not for speculation, but for sovereign preparedness.

The idea has gained traction among governments since 2025. The United States established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by executive order in March 2025, El Salvador has accumulated Bitcoin since adopting it as legal tender in 2021, and Bhutan's sovereign investment company has built holdings through hydropowered mining. Pakistan's proposal would add one of the world's largest retail crypto markets to that small list — and, in Saqib's framing, do it with coins the state already holds.

From Seized Coins to State Reserves

The concept first surfaced during Saqib's keynote at Bitcoin Vegas 2025 on May 29, 2025, where he laid out a plan to repurpose Bitcoin already in government custody. Law enforcement agencies across Pakistan have seized digital assets through various criminal proceedings over the years, and those coins have mostly sat in limbo. Saqib's pitch is to formalize that stash into a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve managed through a national wallet.

By February 2026, Saqib reported that the first governance milestone had been reached: transitioning state-held digital assets into formal custody arrangements designed for transparency and accountability.

The reserve strategy is part of a much larger digital overhaul. Pakistan's government has also moved to redirect 2,000 megawatts of surplus electricity toward Bitcoin mining and AI data center operations. The energy allocation touches a long-running domestic issue: Pakistan's power sector has carried surplus contracted capacity in recent years, with capacity payments due to generators regardless of how much electricity is actually dispatched.

Building the Regulatory Scaffolding

Pakistan enacted the Virtual Assets Act 2026, which formally established PVARA as the country's digital asset regulator and created a licensing portal for virtual asset service providers. The entire licensing infrastructure was reportedly built on a budget of approximately $200,000, accounting for about 8% of the authority's total budget.

The act marks a sharp reversal in official posture. As recently as 2018, the State Bank of Pakistan barred banks and financial institutions from processing virtual currency transactions, and Pakistan spent years on the FATF "grey list" of jurisdictions under increased monitoring before being removed in October 2022. A licensing regime with formal oversight is a fundamentally different approach — one that treats virtual assets as an activity to be supervised rather than shut out.

Saqib, who previously served as CEO of the Pakistan Crypto Council before taking the PVARA chairmanship in May 2025, has consistently framed digital assets not as speculative instruments but as tools for financial inclusion. In a country of roughly 240 million people where a significant share of the population remains unbanked, that framing carries real weight.

Pakistan reportedly has around 40 million digital asset users, making it one of the largest retail crypto markets on the planet. Until recently, however, nearly all of that activity existed in a gray zone, with no formal regulatory framework, no consumer protections, and no mechanism for the state to capture any benefit from the activity happening within its borders. The open questions now are practical ones: how many service providers register through the new portal, how the reserve's holdings are valued and reported under the new custody arrangements, and how the shift from informal to licensed channels unfolds for the country's tens of millions of users.

Source: CryptoBriefing